Last night, Pres. Barack Obama joined Jimmy Fallon to slow jam the news on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In the periodic segment on the show, someone reads the news while Fallon and his band The Roots riff on the straight news. So for our funny video of the week, check out Pres. Obama, Jimmy Fallon, and The Roots slow jammin’ the news.
For the most part Pres. Obama played it straight delivering campaign lines addressed to the college crowd at the show’s taping at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Still, “the Preezy of the United Steezy” was a good sport for participating in the funny segment. “Oh yeah.”
What did you think of the President going on the late night talk show? Leave your two cents in the comments.
One advantage to being a sitting president is that you do not have to go through the party debates. Instead of standing on stage with people attacking you, you get to do cool things like sing with B.B. King. This clip is from an tribute to the blues yesterday at the White House, which included Buddy Guy, Mick Jagger, and Booker T. Jones. At the end, Pres. Barack Obama gave in to the requests to sing a few lines of “Sweet Home Chicago,” his follow-up single to his cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”
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White House press secretary Jay Carney commented on Pres. Obama’s impromptu songs by noting that the president has “a hidden talent that we’re just getting to hear.”
Which former president would you like to hear sing? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Robert Hegyes, who played Sweathog Juan Epstein on Welcome Back Kotter passed away. I hope he has a note to get into heaven. In other death news, Ian Abercrombie, who played “Mr. Pitt” on Seinfeld, passed away. RIP.
Yesterday on Fox News, Hank Williams Jr. got in some trouble for apparently comparing Pres. Barack Obama to Hitler, resulting in ESPN pulling his opening montage for Monday Night Football (“Are You Ready for Some Football!?”). To be fair, he actually said that Pres. Obama and House Speaker John Boehner getting together would be “like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu.” So even though he showed great disdain for the president in the rest of the conversation, his controversial comment was more about the divide between the Democrats and Republicans. Still, he should have known that comparisons to Hitler are likely to cause problems. I cannot wait to see the “Downfall” video someone makes from this event.
Williams’s comment that provoked the most humor, though, is when he called the president and the vice-president “The Three Stooges.” So, to help Mr. Williams out with his math, today we present “3 is a Magic Number” from Schoolhouse Rock:
Schoolhouse Rock was a series of short animated musical segments that gave me a short burst of education on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. The series originally ran from 1973-1985, but the series was revived in the 1990s. The ABC series covered a range of categories, including Grammar Rock, Multiplication Rock, History Rock, and Science Rock. Several specific videos are forever etched in my memory, including “Conjunction Junction” and “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” But perhaps the one song that has had a significant life of its own among rock artists is “3 is a Magic Number.”
Several of the songs have been recorded by rock artists, including on this compilation CD. But “3 is a Magic Number” seems to be the one that works best outside the Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, perhaps because it is a great song and it works as an independent song about family and love. On the other hand, “Conjunction Junction” cannot be about anything besides conjunctions. “3 is a Magic Number” has been performed by Jeff Buckley, Blind Melon, the Jonas Brothers, Alvin & the Chipmunks, Jack Johnson, and De La Soul.
Now if we could just add Hank Williams Jr. to the list. “Are you ready for some math?”
What is your favorite Schoolhouse Rock song? Who would you like to hear sing it?
[Oct. 6, 2011 Update: Today ESPN announced that Hank Williams Jr. will no longer appear on Monday Night Football. Williams claims that he was the one who decided to part ways.]
After additional pressure on President Barack Obama, he released the long-form version of his birth certificate this morning in an attempt to calm down all of the insane media attention largely driven of late by The Celebrity Apprentice’sDonald Trump. At the news conference this morning, though, I was a little disappointed that Bruce Springsteen did not show up to play “Born in the U.S.A.” as part of the spectacle.
It would not have been the first time that the song appeared in presidential politics. In 1984, during a presidential campaign stop in New Jersey, Pres. Ronald Reagan appeared to invoke “Born in the U.S.A.,” which was extremely popular at the time: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts.” Reagan explained, “It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”
Although Springsteen was less active politically in those days than in recent years, he would make a few comments on stage and in interviews in response to the comments by Pres. Reagan, who would go on to win the 1984 election in a landslide over Walter Mondale.
But Springsteen’s most pointed response came a decade later in a re-working of “Born in the U.S.A.” around the time of his Ghost of Tom Joad tour. Where the hit version sounded like an anthem, and that helped make it a hit song, his new version was quieter, stressing the sadness in the words. Pres. Reagan had focused on the sound of the original and misinterpreted the hopeless defiance in the music as a message of hope. By changing the music but not the words into a bluesier version, Springsteen captured the despair faced by many Americans that was — and is — often overlooked in popular culture.
Bonus “Born in the USA” Information: “Born in the U.S.A.” originated in an acoustic form when Springsteen was working on his Nebraska album. Although he reworked the song with the E Street band into an anthem for the Born in the U.S.A. album, the acoustic version is available on the four-CD collection Tracks. I suppose that “Born in the U.S.A.” would be too sad to play at a press conference about our President’s birth, so maybe they could have asked Miley Cyrus to perform this song.
. But “3 is a Magic Number” seems to be the one that works best outside the Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, perhaps because it is a great song and it works as an independent song about family and love. On the other hand, “Conjunction Junction” cannot be about anything besides 
album, the acoustic version is available on the four-CD collection 
. I suppose that “Born in the U.S.A.” would be too sad to play at a press conference about our President’s birth, so maybe they could have asked Miley Cyrus to perform